If you've got a lot of data that you rarely touch, Amazon wants to put it on ice. Amazon Glacier is a new ultra-cheap cloud storage offering from Amazon Web Services that's designed for companies—or data-hoarding individuals—who have a lot to stow away for the long haul.

The advantages of Glacier are prices as low as $0.01 per gigabyte per month and no more dealing with tapes or hard drives. The drawback is, ahem, glacial transfer speeds. According to the company, "Amazon Glacier is optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable." So we're talking about financial documents that need to be archived and not all the ripped movies you'd like to be able to access at the drop of a hat. Between this and Facebook's arctic server farm it looks like companies are banking hard on our trust in penguins. [Amazon Web Services via TechCrunch]